Amid the flood of big tech layoffs, entry to Y Combinator has become the most competitive it's ever been. Silicon Valley's premier business incubator has received 44,000 applications so far this year, the most ever, and the acceptance rate for its summer batch was less than 1%, the lowest in the organization's history.

President & CEO. Garry Tan is President and CEO of Y Combinator. He was a partner at Y Combinator from 2011 to 2015, where he built key parts of the YC experience for founders including Bookface and the Demo Day website.

The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies started via Y Combinator include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe, and Twitch.

And, on its face, the "37 companies" number seems relatively impressive. In fact, however, the number tells a scary and depressing story. This number suggests that a startling 93% of the companies that get accepted by Y Combinator eventually fail.